


Heat Rises

by nachttour



Category: Homestuck, MS Paint Adventures, MSPA
Genre: Feelings, M/M, Update fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-30
Updated: 2012-11-30
Packaged: 2017-11-19 21:53:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,262
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/578048
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nachttour/pseuds/nachttour
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jake 'if the skies are out, my thighs are out' English has disappeared again. This is not an uncommon occurrence. As a pair you have dominated LOTAK and explored the other worlds, there is a distance growing between you. Shit. That's some stalkery thinking. Drop, hit the floor, twenty pushups. Breathing through a gas-mask while exerting effort sucks. More reason to get done quickly. Those accomplished, back up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Heat Rises

Heat Rises  
Nachttour 2012

 

They say that heat rises. It is an observable fact. Watching steam curl up and into the air proves it to your naked eyes. You wish that it was the case for emotion. That it could rise up and out of you, into the air and far away to wherever it is that heat goes to dissipate fully, if it ever does.

Jake 'if the skies are out, my thighs are out' English has disappeared again. This is not an uncommon occurrence. As a pair you have dominated LOTAK and explored the other worlds, there is a distance growing between you. Shit. That's some stalkery thinking. Drop, hit the floor, twenty pushups. Breathing through a gas-mask while exerting effort sucks. More reason to get done quickly. Those accomplished, back up.

Walk through the arches and hallways and avoid skeletons or strife with skeletons. All of it blurs. You miss him on your left side. That is where he tends to settle. It's different than you imagined. In a lot of ways it is better. Hanging out in your house and watching the storms build on the horizon has nothing on the cloudbursts of your world, or the mask-muffled laughter of your boyfriend.

You have a boyfriend.

Maybe you have a boyfriend.

Check your phone, there is a picture of you two grinning in the too-thin air of LOTAK. An observable fact.

Fucking stop it Strider.

Twenty chin-ups on a dangling piece of rebar? You're not really sure what the horizontal pieces are; but you are sure that they help maintain the structural integrity of the tombs. The burn in your arms helps you to refocus and reorient. Where are you? What are you doing?

You are playing SBURB and you are playing it to win.

But who are you? There are stairs upcoming and you take them at a quick pace, feet barely making a sound as you descend. The old adage nags at you. Gotta watch out for those stairs.

Are you the boy laying in a heap on the floor of your room, head very neatly severed?

Are you the robot that you mailed meticulously piece by piece to Mr. English?

Are you the hero of Derse standing defiantly over thousands of the citizenry roaring beneath you?

Maybe you are the one pulling all of the strings to this crazy venture, moving your friends like chess-pieces aimed at the singular goal of success.

There is even a small chance that you are hidden away in the hyper-durable polymers that compose your shades, answering random facts and trolling your acquaintances.

When you try to understand your world you feel dizzy. Everything is huge and complex. There is so much more to this than just your room and the internet. One can certainly read, one can attempt to know, but experience is king. Every step, every kill, every discovery expands you, making you infinitely more complex. When you sit next to him and slide your fingers through his, the rough material of your gloves interfering with full-on skin contact, your world narrows and sharpens. Jake clarifies things. You worry about everything, consider the constellations of probability. He charges in, often to mixed results; but brilliantly fearless nonetheless. You might even venture to say cavalier. The intricacies of his movements and expressions fascinate you. The smell of his skin, the flash of his teeth, the rending hue of his eyes. All of it is thousands of times better than you ever could have imagined over text.

It is different too. Sometimes kind of hard.

You hadn't realized that deodorant was a thing. You just kind of assumed that having a nice musk was part of being an adult. The only thing that it might have bothered was your bird-friend. However, seeing Jake apply some and jauntily offer it over, you took to the concept enthusiastically! Now you aren't stinky, though you still don't worry about it too much. He's too much of a gentleman to ever say anything and that is just one more of the points of him that you appreciate. He is never one to outright embarrass you.

The boy is a love. He doesn't tell you off when you talk too loud. You are beginning to realize that you have volume-control problems via his relative proximity during conversation. When you first met, you were a bit of a mumbler. You talked to yourself at home, but no one talked back. The voice-recognition software on your rig listened and then later so did your bots. Jake is a bit different than those things. Making up for it perhaps you were a bit too enthusiastic-- he took to standing away when you talked. Roxy was kind enough to clue you into the fact that you were probably yelling into his ear. There is a part of you that wishes he would just tell you when you do awkward things. You know you do them. You lived all by yourself. This is to be expected. You would really just like to know so that you could fix it, whatever it is that you are doing. Instead, Jake kind of gets this half-smile, half-grimace and avoids the subject. It is not helpful.

Oh well. If nothing else you can text. Texting is easy. You can get your point across and there's no problems with volume or distance. He does not always answer you but you don't expect him to! He's a busy man, much like you are; plus, dual-wielding pistols does require two hands. Between all of the puzzle-solving and skeleton executing you can't really expect him to answer you all the time...

Fifty crunches. Alternate sides. There are no more stairs to be your excuse. The inside of your mask is fogging up just a tiny bit. That's all right. Just heat leaving you, like you want it to.

You want to crawl inside of Jake English. You could make yourself a home inside of his ribcage, let your warmth radiate out and through him and power him to greater heights.

Every time you talk lately, it seems like he is getting far away.

There's a rock over there that is a good size. Twenty reps on each side. Curl. Let your biceps wobble just a little. You'll do forms next.

He's getting further away in distance. He doesn't sit next to you when you're taking a break.

That's fine! Space is good. You have talked to the girls about this, and they assure you space is a good thing.

But you can't close the distance. It keeps growing. It makes you feel panicky. Do you tell a joke? Do you talk about it? How do you catch up to him as he slips through corridors and through the darkness.

This is stupid.

Throwing the rock over the edge of the catacomb you currently stand in you listen as it makes odd, echoing thumps on its journey into the obscure dark below.

Striders are born genetically cool. It is a predisposition. It is in your blood.

You have to let the heat out and return to your natural state.

If you concentrate hard enough you can let it rise out of your bones and slide free of your flesh up and into the roiling clouds above you.

Let the horrendous pressure stop beating around your chest like a bird stuck in a room, banging into walls.

You check your phone again. No reply.

Sliding it into your pocket you close your eyes against the light-flares above you.

You burn.


End file.
